Essay: Tár, Civil War, and intention
And: would Lydia Tár have shot her dog?
My recent review of the 2022 Todd Field film “Tár” was spurred by my sister-in-law S.G. She said she’d just read a review of "Tár" by Richard Brody1 published in the New Yorker back when the film came out late in 2022, thought it missed the point of the movie, and wanted to talk about it. So I rewatched the film and wrote about it. The movie, I wrote, is comparable to “Citizen Kane” in its scope and its theme: the examination of a powerful person who is also an egomaniac who abuses her authority.
The same day, a strange story came up in the news. In a new book which she apparently thought would burnish her cred among Trump followers and boost her chances to be named his running mate this summer, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem tells about an episode in her family life. The family had acquired a dog that she wanted to make a hunting dog. The animal turned out to be unsuitable for the task, so instead of doing what anyone with a heart would do, like hang onto the dog because her family had grown to love it, or even give it away, she shot the dog in cold blood. I’ll come back to this.
After writing my piece on "Tár," I read the Brody review of the film, as well as two others2 published in the New Yorker. My sister-in-law was right — Brody’s review misses the point in so many ways that he may have been shooting in the opposite direction: not only is almost every point he makes wrong, but in large part whatever he says, the opposite is more true. The other two pieces, especially the Tavi Gevinson review, are much better. (This is beside the point, but every time I’ve read a Brody review recently, he seems very off the mark. I don’t have a grasp of his work over time, but whatever he’s eating lately, he should change his diet.)
One line in Anthony Lane’s piece really struck me (emphasis mine):
To what extent (Tár) is a proven predator; how much she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation; and why, despite everything, she should enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way that a middle-aged man in her position would not: such issues will, no doubt, be aired and contested in due course. (Writer-director Todd) Field is wise enough to reserve judgment.
I would put it differently. Like a novel told from a close third-person point of view, every scene in “Tár” centers its title character; there are no scenes in which she is present but in which another character’s words and actions take the focus away from her. The events of the movie are told from a perspective that is very close to that of the title character without actually being her perspective.
For example, the first image in the movie shows a mobile phone, the screen of which shows a slumped, disheveled, sleep-masked Tár (Cate Blanchett); beyond the phone, out of focus, is the same scene, indicating that the image is fresh. Superimposed on the image is a mocking text exchange between the phone’s owner and an unknown party.
Since Tár’s personal assistant-cum-conducting understudy Francesca accompanies her boss almost everywhere, including to international destinations, it makes sense that the owner of the phone is Francesca. (We don’t know this yet, nor do we yet know that Lydia Tár is the last person anyone would expect to see in a dishevled state. Her whole brand is control — of the orchestra she conducts, of her other colleagues, her sycophants, her spouse (named Sharon, who must be “S” in the text exchange), her public image and her private one. This image foreshadows her loss of control over all these elements of her life by the end of the film.)
If the leading candidate for that close third-person narrator is Francesca, she’s not in every scene, by a long shot. Nevertheless, that’s the viewpoint of this film: very close to Lydia, not only seeing both her perfection and her flaws, but understanding what they mean.
Is Lane correct, then, when he suggests that writer-director Tood Field reserves judgment? If we understand the film as being from the perspective of Francesca, or someone just as close as Francesca is to Lydia, the answer has to be no. Francesca judges Lydia from the film’s first frame. It’s one of the few perks of the job.
Lane’s comment also reminded me of what many say is the guiding principle of a current, widely-seen film, “Civil War” (which I also reviewed recently). “Civil War” is an action movie that centers its attention on front-line combat journalists. It follows two photographers and two print journalists as they observe a new civil war on American soil.
If you don’t know about the movie, you might be forgiven if you think that the conflict is some leftist force against a right-wing army. You also might make a guess that any coming civil war in the U.S. will not be between ideologies but between haves and have-nots — states that have water and those who don’t, perhaps. But those guesses are wrong. The war is between the U.S. government headed by a president played by Nick Offerman, and rebel forces constituting the union of California and Texas; Florida seems also to be fighting the government on a southern front.
California and Texas? you might ask. How could they ever get together on anything? The answer is, they can’t. On almost any conflict you could think of, California and Texas would be on opposite sides. But this conundrum does the opposite of undermining the film’s premise — it makes it possible. The causes of the war, its backstory, and whatever the “Western forces” want, are obscured. There are very few clues as to what the war is about at all.
That means viewers have to take the fighting neutrally — you don’t know whom to root for. Thus viewers identify with the journalists. Journalists are supposed to be neutral, right? They’re not supposed to take sides. So as we follow the four journalists through the film, as they witness firefights and atrocities and mass graves, neither they nor we know who they’re covering, even while it’s happening. Could be the rebels, could be the government, could be neither one: one fighting group wears Hawaiian shirts.
In the film’s most compelling scene, one partially contained in the film’s trailer, the group is detained by camo-wearing men holding automatic weapons. As with almost every scene in the film until the final twenty minutes, neither the journalists nor we the viewers know which side (if any) these armed, touchy men are on.
Reporter (Walter Moura): There’s been some kind of misunderstanding here.
Armed man (Jesse Plemons): Oh?
Reporter: We’re Americans.
Armed man: Okay. (Pause) What kind of Americans are you?
Journalists look at each other for clues, shrug helplessly
Armed man: You don’t know?
Except for the sudden, brutal shootings that accompany the scene, it could be a comedy. Who’s on first? Sorry, it’s not a comedy.
Say what you will about a movie that so strenuously refuses to take sides in today’s culture war while depicting the country actually dissolved in a civil war, the filmmakers (including writer-director Alex Garland) could hardly have done the movie otherwise. If they were to depict liberal “good guy” rebels fighting to defeat a fascist, Trump-like president — and Nick Offerman’s president does exhibit some Trump-like mannerisms— or if it were to depict the opposite, “Civil War” would be seen as merely a partisan exercise, and would itself become a weapon in the culture war.3 Instead, it has sparked debates about what it means to be neutral in today’s society.
Does “Civil War” reserve judgment, as Lane claims in the case of "Tár"? Is its refusal to even see the distinctions between its two sides a form of neutrality? Maybe so — if reserving judgment is only a necessary phase before rendering judgment. Francesca is supposed to be on Lydia’s side — she’s Lydia’s body man and protégé, and possibly a former lover. (The physical extent of their relationship with each other, and with Krista, a former in-group member who was, before the story begins, cast out, is kept ambiguous.) She’s supposed to support Lydia, at times acting in her stead in negotiations with record companies and venues. It’s not her role to criticize or judge, despite Lydia hypocritically telling Francesca that she can.
And yet she does judge — in the film’s first image, and throughout. We can see it in her wordless reactions to Lydia, especially later in the film as things start to fall apart for her boss. Then, after a final disappointment — Lydia decides to give the assistant conductor position to “someone more qualified,” despite even her spouse Sharon’s assumption that Francesca was in line for it — Francesca makes her final judgement. She goes over to the other side in a lawsuit against Lydia and her foundation, providing them access to a trove of incriminating emails that Lydia had told her to delete.
So where do viewers come down? One of the things Richard Brody gets wrong about "Tár" is that he thinks the filmmakers are intending to glorify Lydia and to condemn the “cancel culture” that sees her brought down. As I said earlier, the opposite is true: writer-director Field puts Lydia under a microscope, not on a pedestal. "Tár" is a movie about a master — or maestro — manipulator, a figure so powerful in both her institution and in her relationships that she creates, as was said about the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, a “reality distortion field” within which people convince themselves that her reasons, or her charisma, justify whatever she says and does. Field’s, and Cate Blanchett’s, depiction of such a monster is a useful warning.
So we come back to Gov. Kristi Noem. In an Apr. 26 article, the Guardian describes a passage in her to-be-released campaign autobiography “No Going Back”:
By taking (14-month-old terrier puppy) Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”. …
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”. …
Noem got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
That’s from an Apr. 26 story in the Guardian.
Main points there: The dog was “having the time of her life … the picture of pure joy.” Thus she deserved to die.
Cricket uncontrollably killed chickens, yes — but Noem had just brought her on a hunt for birds. The bird-killing was reserved for Noem alone; Cricket was doing it wrong. Noem hated the dog for disobeying her and for usurping her bird-killing role. But most of all, the dog was having a good time at it, just being a dog, and somehow this seems to have enraged Noem even more.
It brought to mind the character I had just written about, Lydia Tár. Tár is a monster, an egomaniac who manipulates everyone for her own ends. She flatters or coddles them to serve her or satisfy her ambition or her ego, then casts them aside with a withering insult if she even scents disloyalty or defiance.
Yes, one of her protégés, who once was as close to Lydia as Francesca is — “the three of us were so close,” says Francesca — does commit suicide after Lydia casts her out and then sabotages her career for good measure. But Tár doesn’t kill her. Getting rid of her and leaving her with nothing, in pet owner terms, is more the equivalent of putting a dog out on the shoulder of a freeway. A cruel, heartless act, but at least it’s possible the dog will be rescued and fostered and eventually given a home by someone who understands that a dog is a sentient being capable of undying love.
Tavi Gevinson, What “Tár” Knows About the Artist as Abuser; Anthony Lane, Baton Charge
I realize that “culture war,” a phrase that started at least 20 years ago to describe the conflict between left-wing people and far-right conservatives, is inadequate to describe today’s deep divisions, but I’m choosing to use it for the sake of convenience. You know what I mean.
This was woven together so masterfully! Dang, that Kristi Noem story....Brilliant to use it as an anchor to discuss the films. So glad to read someone else who saw something generative in the supposed 'neutrality' of Civil War.